


What We Lose Along the Way

by MuseofWriting



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Gen, Multi, come here to cry, do not come here for the relationships, super heavy angst people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-09
Updated: 2016-10-10
Packaged: 2018-08-20 12:32:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8249171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MuseofWriting/pseuds/MuseofWriting
Summary: It takes a decade to tear out the heart of the Galra Empire. With Zarkon defeated, the universe is safe and peaceful once again, and Pidge is free to return home. But those ten years have not passed without change and sacrifice. What happened to the five young Paladins that left Earth so long ago?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This work was partially inspired by strixmoonwing's Blue Lion theory, which I suggest checking out for context before you read the fic: http://strixmoonwing.tumblr.com/post/149352146787/theory-on-the-future-fate-of-the-blue-lion

 

### Part 1: Lance

            When the planet came into sight, Pidge burst into tears.

            The patterns of green and blue were achingly familiar. Clouds swirled across the surface in what Pidge thought was the most beautiful sight she had ever seen. The moon hung in space beside it, silver and placid. City lights twinkled in the dark.

            She hadn’t set foot on Earth in over ten years.

            She heard footsteps behind her and scrubbed rapidly at her leaky eyes. She was a grown woman, the sometime Green Paladin of Voltron, Defender of the Universe, Vanquisher of Rido, the Savior of Keinsh, the Hand that Slew the Galra, and she didn’t cry. Even if it was just in front of her brother.

            The footsteps stopped just behind her shoulder, and after a moment of silence Matt let out a slow whistle. “I really thought I was never going to see it again,” he said. Pidge stared ahead through the spaceship’s window, unable to tear her eyes away from the planet she had fought so long and hard to return to. “Home,” Matt said carefully, as if testing the word in his mouth. “I don’t… I don’t know if I know what that means anymore, to be honest.” She could feel the uncertain smile in his voice, the tilted look she knew he was giving her, the attempt at levity flashing in his eyes. She remained quiet. “I wonder if Mom’s still alive,” he said finally, very quietly. At that, she tore her eyes away from drinking in the American coastline and turned to take his hand.

            “She better be. How else are we going to get grounded for a month for being so reckless?” Matt wrapped her into a tight hug, and then they both turned back to staring out the window.

            “I forgot there was so much ocean,” he said quietly. “I haven’t seen that much water in one place since we crash-landed on Praeton. What was that, two years ago? I guess I spent all my time on Earth looking up at the stars. I didn’t spare much time for looking at what was there on the ground with me.” The ocean shifted with clouds and color, greens and blues and whites all intertwined. Pidge tried to remember the feel of a sandy Earth beach squishing between her toes as the chill of saltwater rushed back and forth across her ankles.

            _“The sound of the ocean,” Lance said, ticking off another finger. “Sound in_ general _, you know, space is so quiet. But my mamá, she used to take us every summer to visit my uncle in California, and I always slept better when I could hear the ocean outside the window.”_

_“You know, Lance, if you miss everything on Earth so much, I don’t really understand why you were so eager to become a pilot at the Garrison,” Hunk replied, paying more attention to the food goo he was mixing experimentally than to Lance, lounging despondently at the end of the table. “Didn’t you want to go off and have adventures in space?”_

_“I never thought I’d be having adventures in space for_ years _at a time, Hunk,” he snapped back, and then sighed. “I miss dreaming about being in space.”_

 _“How does that make_ any _sense?” Keith asked. “Isn’t the point of dreams to achieve them?”_

_“You don’t understand.” Lance sighed dramatically. “It’s about the chase, the desire. Now that I can fly off into space whenever Blue and I feel like it, what am I supposed to dream about doing?”_

_“Kissing Allura?” Hunk suggested. “That one will never happen, so you can dream about it all you want.” Keith choked on his food goo. Pidge pounded him on the back until he recovered enough breath to be in stitches of laughter. Lance shot all of them a dirty look._

_“It wasn’t_ that _funny,” he grumbled. “Come on, like you all don’t want to flirt with her too.”_

_“Nuh-uh.”_

_“Nope.”_

_“I’m fine.”_

_Lance pushed away from the table dramatically. “I can’t help that I’m a natural romantic,” he said. “You’re all just hopeless.”_

_“Dude, I’m practically expecting roses to appear out of thin air. Do you want to try being a little less ridiculous?” Pidge asked, rolling her eyes._

_“I am alone in the vastness of space, with no one to return my love. It lends itself to drama,” Lance said, finally toning down on his last sentence, leaving it with a shrug. Pidge snorted._

_“Lance, I dare you to kiss Keith,” she said. This time, both Lance and Keith choked._

_“You dare me to WHAT?” Lance spluttered._

_“Pidge, w-wh-why, what, what…” Keith’s face was the color of his jacket._

_“You said you wanted someone to return your love, right? So I dare you to kiss Keith.”_

_“That has NOTHING TO DO WITH_ — _”_

_“Pidge, you’re mostly pretty smart, but this is a terrible idea. Lance kissing anyone is a terrible idea, honestly,” Keith said, making a valiant effort at a calm voice._

_“WHY?” Lance retorted, suddenly turning on Keith. “Because you think I’m a bad kisser?” Keith went, if possible, even redder._

_“I didn’t—”_

_“I’ll have you know I’m an_ excellent _kisser.”_

_“I really don’t—”_

_“I’ll_ prove it _.”_

_“Wait—” Before Keith could even stand up, Lance had grabbed the front of his jacket, pulled him close, and kissed him. The kiss lasted, in Pidge’s opinion, at least three ticks too long for a mere dare. When Lance finally did pull away, both of them stared at each other for a moment in a sort of state of shock, and then both spat out excuses so quick and garbled that Pidge didn’t hear a word of them and fled in opposite directions. She held it in for a whole minute before she dissolved into tears of laughter._

_“Oh, please, the tension between those two was getting thick enough to cut with a knife. I’ve done us all a favor,” she said in reply to Hunk’s judgmental look. “The first time I ever met Keith Lance recognized him from behind, in the dark, with half his face covered. I mean, are you_ kidding _me?” She broke into more laughter. “Those two have been making eyes at each other since the beginning, they’re just both too proud of their dumb rivalry to admit it. And maybe this will stop Lance flirting with the rest of us for a while.” Hunk rolled his eyes._

_“When Shiro finds out what happened, you get to explain,” he said, and went back to his food goo._

            The ship’s controls felt strange in her hands. She was perfectly capable of piloting over a dozen different types of spacecraft, but nothing ever felt quite right after flying her lion. The controls in Green fit her like a glove. Everything was instinctual in her lion. She flew on faith and science in equal parts. After that, everything else felt… clunky. She had to think about what she was doing before she could do it. When she flipped a switch, the ship would groan and stutter in response to an unexpected course correction, instead of already be half-turning the way she wanted to go.

            Lance. She had been doing well for most of the journey home, in not thinking about Lance. She swallowed the hot, prickly feeling that rose in her throat when she remembered he had been the most homesick of all of them. She shook her head against the weight that seemed to press into her heart at the memory of Lance’s face, his goofy smile, his dark blue eyes. The look of joy and wonder the first time Keith had kissed _him_ , after he had almost died flying straight into the thick of a Galra fleet to rescue Murin, the young boy of Altean descent they had found running his own resistance.

            Steadying the ship as they approached for landing, Pidge tried to focus on what she was doing. But such a rudimentary landing was as mindless to Pidge as making a sandwich. Actually, she would probably find making a sandwich more complicated after years of subsisting primarily on food goo. Her gaze drifted to her holo-pad, never far out of reach, sitting innocently to the side of the ship’s controls. On it were four addresses, four visits she had to make. She should really make more, but God help her, she couldn’t relive it all that many times over. It would break her. Extended family and friends would just have to make do with second-hand accounts. Lance’s family would come first. After all, he had probably sacrificed the most out of any of them.

            _“Go, go, go, go, GO!” Keith shouted, waving them through with his bayard. Galra gunshots echoed through the corridor behind them. Lance stumbled, leaning on Pidge for support. She looked up at him, concern glinting through her glasses. She had never seen him in such bad shape. A week as a Galra prisoner. She didn’t want to know what they had done to him. Thoughts of Matt and her father rose briefly, but she shoved them down. Lance was the priority. Lance was the one she could rescue right now._

_She and Keith kept Lance between them, fending off Galra attacks. Alarms blared through the ship, both for them and for the fighter ships getting destroyed by Shiro and Hunk outside. The Galra soldiers were deadly, but they were in disarray. They were going to make it. They were going to make it._

_“Allura says the Blue Lion should be at the very end of the ship. We’re almost there. Then you and Blue can fly us home,” Keith told Lance, briefly reaching out to squeeze his hand. Lance managed a smile._

_“Just like you… to fly in here guns blazing… And you can’t even escape without my help,” he said. Keith rolled his eyes but focused on cutting down the soldier in front of him._

_“Come on, let’s go,” he said. Lance stumbled and would have fallen on his face if Keith hadn’t caught him. For a moment they simply stood, breathing heavily, Keith’s free arm wrapped around Lance from behind. Lance leaned against his boyfriend, trying to catch his breath._

_“S-sorry, guys… I just… I’ll be fine…” His eyes were closed. Keith looked at him for a minute, and then cursed, stuck his bayard back on his belt, told Pidge to cover them, and scooped Lance up in his arms. That got his eyes open, at least. “What—”_

_“Let’s go, Pidge,” Keith said, and took off running down the corridor. Lance looked like he wanted to protest, but instead he just pulled his arm up around Keith’s neck and buried his face against his chest. Pidge followed, bayard ready._

_By some miracle, she only had to fend off two more Galra soldiers before they got to the hanger where they were keeping Blue. Keith gently set Lance back on his feet._

_“Almost there,” he promised. “Pidge and I will deal with whatever guards they have and then we’re home free.” Keith and Pidge looked at each other. “Ready?” She nodded, and Keith kicked the door down._

_They stared in confusion for a moment. Where were the Galra? Where were the guards? Surely they wouldn’t just leave the Blue Lion totally unprotected? Then Pidge spotted him. A single black-robed figure, standing by Blue’s back leg._

_“Druid,” she muttered. They didn’t exactly have a good track record dealing with these. She and Keith gripped their bayards and advanced grimly. The druid watched them for a moment, and then suddenly turned on the Blue Lion. It stretched out its hands._

_“What are you— hey!” Keith started running, but a shriek from Lance brought him skidding to a halt. Four Galra soldiers had appeared and caught hold of him. Keith moved so fast Pidge didn’t even see what happened, but the next moment Lance was stumbling towards her, free of the Galra. Keith was a red whirl of fury. She rushed to help him._

_Just as they were finishing off the last soldier, Pidge felt something_ snip _in her chest, like some kind of a connection had been severed. Confused, she turned in time to see Lance gasp and fall to his knees, staring disbelieving at the druid. The last yellow glow of destroyed quintessence was fading from its hands. The Blue Lion’s eyes had gone dark. In a rush, Pidge understood._

_There was a staticy shriek from Allura, demanding to know what had happened, but neither she nor Keith really heard it. Keith rushed toward the druid, but it teleported away, disappearing in a swirl of black. It did not reappear. Far away in the ship the alarms still blared, but here there was silence. A terrible, awful silence._

_Keith screamed in frustration, throwing his bayard at where the druid had been a moment ago. Lance was still on his knees, staring slack-jawed at his lion, now nothing more than a collection of metal and gears. Some small part of Pidge, her logical brain that never entirely shut down, started running probabilities for alternate escape plans, but she was stuck, unable to tear her eyes away from Blue._

_Keith had turned to Lance, now, searching frantically for the words of comfort that he offered so rarely and so awkwardly. He needed Lance to know it was okay. He needed Lance to know they’d fix this, somehow, they’d fix this, he was safe and that was the important part, but Lance wasn’t listening._

_Somehow, he had made it to his feet. He walked right past Keith, who dropped the arm he’d been reaching out to Lance in defeat, and turned away, walking slowly over to retrieve his bayard. Lance continued forward, as if in a trance, walking carefully, his bare feet making no sound on the cold metal floor. He reached his lion, or rather the shell of his lion._

_Shiro and Allura and Coran and Hunk all wanted to know what was happening. A dozen overlapping requests for information filled Pidge’s helmet. She continued to watch Lance, thin and dirty, staring uncertainly up at what had been his most reliable companion for almost six years._

_“Blue?” he said quietly. There was no response. Of course there wasn’t. Pidge tried to ignore the bubble of hope she didn’t want to admit had just popped._

_Lance reached out a hand, carefully, slowly, and touched the side of the lion. A strange blue glow surrounded his hand, and he yanked it back in surprise. Then, cautiously he reached out and did it again. The same blue glow appeared._

_“But how…” he murmured, and paused. “Oh,” he said, eventually, quieter than Pidge had ever heard. He put both hands against the lion and rested his forehead against it. Wherever he touched, there was a faint blue glow “It’s okay, Blue. I’m here. I’ll fix you.” He turned back to Pidge, his eyes full of tears. “Hey, Pidge,” he said, his voice on the edge of breaking. “Tell… tell my family, will you? After you’ve saved the universe and everything, and go back to Earth, tell them what I did? Make me sound cool.”_

_“What?” Pidge asked. Keith had reached his bayard by now, and he turned around, confusion writ across his face._

_“Lance, what—?”_

_“And tell the team I’m sorry I got them into this mess. You guys are—” he stopped, choked, and shook his head. “You all know.”_

_“Lance…”_

_“Keith,” Lance said. He paused, took a breath, closed his eyes for a moment, and a look of utter calm came over his face. Opening his eyes to look at Keith, he spoke the clearest words he’d spoken since they found him. “I love you.”_

_“WAIT—” Before Pidge could react, before she could do anything, Lance had turned back to the lion, and there was an explosion of blue light. She heard Keith calling Lance’s name, sounding anguished, as she stumbled backward. The roar of a lion drowned out the voices on the coms. When the light faded and she had blinked the flashes from her retinas, the Blue Lion’s eyes were bright once again, standing tall above them. Beneath it, Keith was on his knees, cradling Lance’s lifeless body in his arms, cursing over and over._

_“You idiot,” he whispered. “You idiot, you idiot, you idiot. I love you, you idiot. What am I supposed to do now? You self-sacrificing idiot.” Tears dropped from his eyes onto Lance’s cheeks._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Please leave a comment if you are so inclined!


	2. Chapter 2

### Part 2: Shiro

           Pidge forced herself to remember to breathe and stay relaxed as she and Matt landed their little space jumper. Ease it down, softly, softly, and – there. With a small _bump_ , they touched down. She shifted the ship into what was essentially “park”, then leaned back in her chair. It felt almost anticlimactic. A routine landing, a soft little touchdown, and that was it. She was home. She had returned to Earth.

            She and Matt looked at one another, uncertain. They hadn’t really planned beyond this point. Oh, they had talked about being back home (“What’s the first thing you’re going to do?” “Eat a hamburger the size of my head.”) but never the logistics, the details of getting there. It had all seemed too tenuous, too unbelievable. It would have felt like jinxing it to talk about it – surely, at the last minute, some remaining Galra ship would swoop out of the sky and capture them, or they’d get a distress call from the castle, or something. Instead, they were just here.

            “I feel like an alien,” Matt said. “Let’s go draw some crop circles, really freak people out.” Pidge rolled her eyes. Truth be told, she didn’t know what to expect. She peered through the window into the moonlit night. How far had Earth technology advanced in their absence? Did they know about the Galra? About Voltron? A major deciding battle had occurred just on the edge of their solar system, the Paladins fighting tooth and nail to preserve their home, but did they have any idea? Or would they be hurried away to labs and government quarantine if anyone found out where they had been?

            “Hey.” She felt Matt’s hand on her shoulder, a reassuring pressure. “We can do this together, you and me.” She looked up at him and smiled, the first genuine smile she’d managed since catching sight of Earth. She stood up and put her hand on his shoulder.

            “Together,” she agreed. Grabbing her holo-pad off the ship’s dashboard and tucking it into her pocket, she walked out of the control room with her head held high to greet her planet.

            When the landing door opened, cool night air rushed in. She sucked in her breath. Everything, every moment, every atom, was a new first. Her first breath of Earth’s atmosphere in a decade. Matt stood beside her, seeming just as shocked. They reached instinctively for each other’s hands, and stepped outside.

            There was a time when stepping outside at night for Pidge always meant looking at the stars. As a child, she had lain outside for hours, staring up at the night sky, naming the constellations, dreaming of living in the stars. Her dad had a big, old-fashioned telescope that he used to show her stars and planets. He taught her how to chart their movements, and explained how galaxies were born, lived, and died. But now, Pidge had seen more stars in her time than she had ever dreamed of reaching. She had seen delicate, glittering constellations of two hundred stars writhing intricately in the shape of a dragon. She had visited planets that were living creatures in their own right. She had moved moons. She had watched a galaxy die.

            Now, what held her interest was beneath her feet. She stepped outside and stared for a moment, taking it all in. Then she dropped to her knees, scooped up the loose dirt in her fingernails, and laughed aloud. Earth dirt. Earth bugs. She was getting Earth dirt stains on her knees. She wondered if she ought to kiss the ground.

            “It’s _better_ than visiting a whole new planet,” she said giddily. “It’s… it’s… This is absurd, why can’t I find the words?” Matt shook his head in wonder.

            “The air tastes better, somehow. I’m sure that’s all just in my head, but still…” Pidge stood up and surveyed their surroundings. They were in a deserted area not too far from where the Garrison was – or at least where it had been. Mountains broke the sky in the distance.

            “Well, there’s no sign of Garrison guards rushing in to arrest us. I guess we get to use the speeder after all.”

            “We’ll probably be a sight zipping down the highway in something like that. And what are we going to do about the spaceship?”

            “Donate it to science? Save it for a rainy day? Take tourist trips to Mars?” Matt rolled his eyes and went back inside to retrieve the speeder. They had minimal luggage. There was very little that Pidge had actually _owned_ in the Castle of Lions, since most of their belongings had been communal, and even fewer things that she actually wanted to bring back with her. Those things belonged to a different life, a life that it wouldn’t do to be reminded too strongly of while she was trying to rebuild her old one on Earth.

            Matt returned with the speeder, a gleaming wonder in silver. It was the latest model from the planet Ulfunar, one of many gifts of appreciation for destroying the Galra stations there, and had been made approximately 300,000 light-years away from Earth. She climbed into the speeder behind Matt, leaving the top open to the night air. It resembled a motorcycle, she thought – or did it? When was the last time she had been in an Earth car? Probably for something silly, like helping her mother with groceries days before cutting her hair and running away to join the Garrison as a boy. Their car had been black, she remembered, with a soft faux-leather interior.

            _“Thanks for helping me patch Black up, Pidge,” Shiro smiled warmly, sliding down off his lion’s nose from where he had been polishing its newly installed eye. “Whatever that new blast technology they added to their guns is, it sure did a number on us.”_

_“You can say that again.” Pidge and Shiro turned to see Hunk coming into the hangar, deep circles under his eyes. He slid down and sat on the floor with an exhausted “oomph,” curling and uncurling his right hand. “If I never have to see another box of Altean-labeled wires again it will be too soon. Coran and I have been patching the castle back together all night.” He yawned widely. “I was headed for bed, well, food and then bed, but Allura accosted me and ordered me to come check in on you guys and the Black lion.” He yawned again. “I’m happy to help but honestly I’ll probably do better work after a good night’s sleep. And when my hand isn’t more cramped than it’s ever been in my life.” Shiro shook his head with a smile, helping Hunk back to his feet._

_“Pidge and I have got it covered. In fact, we were about to head back up to get some food and rest ourselves.” Hunk yawned a third time, and this time Pidge joined him._

_“Dammit Hunk, you need to stop that, you’re making me sleepy,” she said._

_“S-sorry,” he said, stifling yet another yawn._

_“Okay, let’s get out of here and get some rest,” Shiro chuckled._

_“Yes, dad,” Pidge grumbled. The three of them made a sleepy, shambling procession up to the castle’s main dining room. Four or five of the castle’s other residents were sitting bleary-eyed at the table, recovering from their own sleepless nights or up early to help with the cleanup. The castle’s population had increased impressively from the days when it was just the Paladins, Allura, Coran, and some mice. A number of scattered resistance fighters, conquered soldiers, and refugees had elected to make the Castle of Lions their home over the years. Murin, a sharp-eyed and mischievous Altean boy and the only one who seemed awake, waved cheerily as the three Paladins entered. Pidge raised her hand in greeting, but was interrupted by someone else coming in behind her._

_“Come on, everyone, we’ve got the castle systems back online, but we’ve still got a lot of work ahead of us today.” Allura’s cheery but commanding voice made everyone rub their eyes a bit and groan. “Shiro, Hunk, Pidge, I hope the Black Lion is fully repaired?”_

_“Shipshape, Princess,” Shiro said. Pidge resisted the urge to rub her temples._

_“Are Alteans just born without the gene that makes normal people tired?” she muttered to Hunk. “I swear, she never stops.”_

_“As long as she’s going to let me sleep before doing any more chores, I really don’t care,” Hunk said, and ambled off to find food. Pidge turned to Allura, imposingly tall in the doorway behind her, and flinched a little. It had been almost a year now, but she still couldn’t get used to the sight of Allura wearing the Blue Paladin’s armor._

_“I need to go attend to the castle’s flight systems.” She hesitated a moment, eyes darting to the other diners, then gave Shiro a quick peck on the cheek. “And do be sure to snatch a few hours of sleep, no matter what I say to these slackers,” she whispered. Shiro and Allura shared a brief smile and forehead touch before Allura swept out. Shiro’s smile lingered as he reached absently for a plate._

_The crash made Pidge jump, suddenly on high alert, reaching instinctively for her bayard. She had half-drawn it before she saw Shiro hurriedly and apologetically picking up the shattered pieces of his plate, carefully using only his left hand. Pidge bent down to help. He waved her away._

_“It’s okay, I’ve got it. Sorry, I’m just clumsy today.”_

_“It was your hand again, wasn’t it?” she asked. Shiro didn’t answer, but he stilled for a moment before picking up the next piece. “Shiro…”_

_“It’s fine,” he said. “I’m sure it’s just… getting a bit old, or something.”_

_“We can’t risk you glitching like this in the middle of a battle.” Pidge lowered her voice, glancing at the others in the dining room. Hunk was wolfing down his breakfast at the end of the table, seemingly unconcerned with where Pidge and Shiro had gone. Murin cast them a curious glance, but the others were too preoccupied with their food to pay attention. “Why don’t you let me take a look at it?” she asked. Shiro shook his head._

_“Hunk, Allura, and Coran have all already tried examining it, and none of them can make heads nor tails of how it works. I’d rather just leave it alone than have all of you fussing useless over it.”_

_“I managed to steal some writings on Druid magic,” Pidge blurted out. She stopped, took a deep breath, and continued, not meeting Shiro’s eyes. “Back when we attacked the quintessence supply line in the Grimbok Cluster, I hacked their computers to see if I could get any more up-to-date information on Zarkon’s movements, and I noticed they had a collection of writings on the Druids and quintessence, so I downloaded it. Translating it was hell, but worth the trouble. There was a lot of information there about Druid magic, and quintessence, and how it combines with machinery.” Pidge fixed her eyes on her shoes. “I thought maybe… Maybe I could find a way to talk to Lance.” There was a long pause before Shiro, very, very quietly, asked: “And did you?”_

_She shook her head helplessly. “No, not… I mean… The further I got into researching it, the more it started to seem like I shouldn’t do it. I was reading all this stuff about… necromancy, and calling up corpses versus dead souls, and something about a blood price…” She trailed off, shuddering. “I think… I think that I could find a way to call up Lance’s soul from inside the Blue Lion.” She took a deep breath and raised her eyes to Shiro’s. “But I think doing so would defile everything he sacrificed himself for, and I can’t be that selfish.” Setting down the collected pieces of the plate, he reached out and put his hand on her shoulder._

_“I miss him too,” he murmured. “And there are days when I think I would give anything just to talk with him one more time, to say a proper goodbye, and tell him how sorry I am. But we have to move forward despite it.” She looked down, nodding and wiping at her eyes. “I’ll let you look at my hand,” he said. “On one condition.”_

_“What?”_

_“You promise me never to try and use Druid magic without first talking to me and the other Paladins about it. That stuff is dangerous and we don’t know what repercussions it might have. If we have to use it, better we do it together.” Pidge nodded._

_“Okay,” she said. He smiled, and squeezed her shoulder before letting go._

_“You’re alright, kid,” he said. She rolled her eyes._

_“Shiro, I’m twenty.” He laughed._

_“You’ll always be a kid to me, kid.”_

            Her heart started pounding as the glimmer of headlights suddenly appeared through a gap in the hill. Although the odd abducted human had appeared during their travels, they had been few and far between. She hadn’t been around more than four or five other humans at once since she had left. She tightened her grip on Matt for comfort.

            He pulled them to a stop beside the road. The cars that zoomed past were smaller, faster, and quieter than Pidge remembered, but they were still recognizably Earth cars. Faces flashed past, just visible through tinted windows. Humans who had never left Earth in all their lives.

            “So… Where now?” Matt asked. Reluctantly, Pidge pulled out her holo-pad.

            “I found a Mrs. Sarah K. Holt living alone in an apartment less than 30 miles from our old house. I can’t be certain it’s her, but… It seems pretty likely. So… I guess we go say hi to Mom.” Matt nodded silently. She clicked on the address and the holo-pad automatically connected with the speeder’s on-board systems to project their course out in front of them. Meanwhile, she tried to ignore the lurch of nerves at the sight of the contact just below it – Shiro’s mom.

            Pidge had a difficult time imagining Shiro as a child. From the moment they’d arrived at the Castle of Lions, Shiro had been something between a big brother and a father figure to all of them. Being able to talk to someone who knew Matt and her father, who wanted them back almost as badly as she did, was probably the only thing that had kept her sane through the agony of uncertain leads and countless trails gone cold. Now she was going to have to look his mother in the eye and tell her that she had lost her son while he was saving someone else’s family.

            _“Keith, have you destroyed those canons yet?” Shiro’s voice came crackling through Pidge’s helmet, disrupted by a series of nearby explosions. She heard Keith snort derisively._

_“Who do you take me for?” he asked._

_“Well, something is still firing at that ship, so you must’ve missed one. We need to find it quickly, the ship doesn’t look like it will hold together much longer.”_

_“Those don’t look like normal canon shots.”_

_“Hunk’s right,” said Allura. “They look like they’re fueled by quintessence. They might be Druid magic, performed manually.”_

_“Okay, so we need to get inside and take out the Druids doing it,” said Shiro. “Hunk, Allura, you keep fending off the fighter ships out here. Pidge, get to that ship and see what you can do to help the people inside. Keith, you’re with me. Coran, how’s the castle doing?”_

_“Taking fire, but nothing we can’t handle,” he replied cheerfully._

_“Good,” Shiro said. “Send the backup speeder to cover Red and Black while Keith and I are inside the Druids’ ship.”_

_“Aye aye, captain!” Coran said._

_“Alright, everybody, let’s go.”_

_Pidge kicked the nearest fighter ship towards Blue for Allura to take care of, and flew over to the scrappy little rebel ship that had bitten off more than it could chew, attacking the Druids. It really must have been dead in the water – it wasn’t even trying to avoid the attacks anymore._

_She found an airlock and pulled up next to it, ensuring that her suit was space-tight before climbing out of her lion. There was a short alien covered in soft, yellow fur waiting inside for her, dark green eyes wide with fear. “All our systems are failing and they blasted away the lifeboats! Please, can you help us? Can you get us off the ship?” the little alien said as soon as Pidge was inside the ship. She held up her hands._

_“Slow down, slow down. Let me take a quick look at the controls. Maybe I can fix them enough to get you guys outta here.” The yellow alien looked stricken for a moment, but then it scampered off, leaving Pidge to follow._

_The ship’s interior was a patchwork of so many repairs and cobbled-together pieces Pidge thought that it must have started its life in a junkyard. The lights were low, emergency lighting only, and the ship shook and rumbled and groaned with each new hit. She grimaced. There might be no saving this thing after all. She stepped up her pace and followed the alien into the main control room, where a small, motley crew was working in barely controlled panic. A remarkably human-looking figure stood in the center, his back to her, fingers flying over the control panel and shouting commands._

_“Lamur, take a run through the storage units and see if there’s anything useful, anything at all. I don’t care if it’s a five-minute oxygen top-up canister, I want it brought up here. Wex, see if you can find any more systems to divert to life support. We are_ losing air _, people, we are losing air. Pashina, how’s—” He paused for a moment as the yellow alien reached him and muttered something to him urgently, pointing back at Pidge._

_She had stopped dead a few steps into the room, frozen. The man’s voice roared in her ears. She stared at his shoulders, his messy, untended hair, the glint of glasses as his head turned side to side. She ripped her helmet off her head and could only watch as he turned around, her heart thundering against her ribs so hard she thought it might break her. The chaos of the breaking ship whirled around her, but she barely noticed it. She was alone with him. She had to be wrong. She had to be. It had been so long she was imagining things. She had forgotten his voice and she was imagining things._

_He was thinner and gaunter than she remembered. His eyes held a cold edge that she didn’t recognize. But it was him._

_“Matt?” she breathed. He was staring at her, his expression moving rapidly from confusion to disbelief to suspicion back to confusion and then, hesitantly, slowly, to awe._

_“Katie? Is… But… You’re…” He didn’t get another word out before she had flown across the room and crashed into him with a hug. He took a moment to hug back. “I can’t believe… HOW…?”_

_“Me how? YOU how, how did you escape the Galra, Shiro said—”_

_“Shiro’s ALIVE?”_

_“—but who in the universe are these people, how—”_

_“Matt, we’ve got another hull breach!” one of the aliens broke in. Matt blinked, and seemed to recover himself._

_“How bad?” he asked._

_“Air loss has increased 15%.” Matt cursed._

_“Katie, whatever those lion robots are, can you use them get us out of here? We’re losing air too fast to do anything to fix the ship. I already had to divert all power to life support to try and replenish what we’re losing enough to keep us all conscious.”_

_“How many are you?”_

_“Just nine of us.”_

_“That’s still too many to fit in just one lion. Hang on a moment.” She jammed her helmet back onto her head. “Hunk! There’s no way we can save this ship fast enough to get them out of danger. Get Yellow over here and we’ll load them onto the lions and bring them back to the castle.”_

_“Roger that, on my way.”_

_“Shiro, you there?”_

_“What is it, Pidge?”_

_“Shiro, Matt’s here. He’s here. He’s alive.”_

_“What? He’s… Oh, thank God,” Shiro gasped. “Tell him he can return that punch in the face soon, okay? We’ll be back to the castle before you know it.” Pidge grinned widely at her brother._

_“Shiro says you owe him a punch in the face.” Matt shook his head in amazement. “Get your crew gathered, help is on the way.”_

_Pidge moved through the ship feeling like she was floating on cloud. She was giddy, disbelieving. After all this time, to think she would just come across him, as part of a rag-tag rebel group dedicated to poking at the Galra wherever they could, seemed absurd. Her luck couldn’t be that good. Matt moved through the ship briskly, barking out orders, gathering up his crew, but he kept glancing back at her with a look of wonder that softened that unfamiliar cold edge in his eyes._

_“I’ve chased off two Druids on the bottom floor of the ship,” Keith said through the coms. “Shiro, where are you? If Pidge and Hunk are getting the rebel crew on board, then we should pull back while we can.” There was an uncomfortably long pause. “Shiro?”_

_“Haggar’s here,” he said quietly._

_“Shiro, you need to get out of there!” Allura said. “We’re not prepared to take her on!”_

_“Keith, go on and get out of here. I’m right behind you.”_

_“You idiot, I’m coming to you,” Keith snapped._

_“You won’t be able to get in the door. She sealed it shut.”_

_“I’LL FIND A WAY.”_

_“KATIE!” Pidge jumped at Matt’s voice. “Are you okay? I said your name like eight times.”_ Right, _she thought_ , I better tell him I haven’t gone by Katie since he went missing _. The thought was vague, distracting, floating unconnected through her head._

_“Sorry. Did you get everyone gathered together?”_

_“We’re all here,” he said. The small crowd of crew huddled behind him, looking around anxiously as the ship groaned and cracked._

_“Pidge, I’m pulling up now,” Hunk said in her ear. “We better hurry. Allura can’t hold off the fighter ships by herself for very long.”_

_“Got it,” she said. “Matt, five members of your crew—” She was cut off by a scream of agony over the headset._

_“SHIRO!” she shrieked, Allura, Keith, Hunk, and Coran’s voice joining her. She could hear his labored breathing. Keith was screaming at him incoherently, and Allura was screaming at Keith to be quiet so Shiro could tell them how to get him out._

_“Get OUT of here. ALL of you!” he gasped. The grunts and groans of fighting shivered through the helmet._

_“No…” Pidge whispered. “Nononononono.”_

_“Katie, what’s happening?” Matt was asking anxiously. Shiro’s breath was coming in short bursts._

_“I can’t lose you. I can’t. I_ won’t _.”_

_“I can’t break through the door,” Keith said, his voice breaking with despair. “I can hear him but I can’t — get — in!” If she knew Keith, he had just punctuated those last three words with three more slashes at the door._

_“Keith,” she said, swallowing. “Where in the ship are you?”_

_“On the top floor, right in the center. But you need to get Matt and the others back to the castle. You won’t get here in time.”_

_“I’m coming! Shiro, I’m coming!” Allura’s voice was desperate. “I’m—” The faint sound of an explosion told Pidge Allura had been blasted off course. There were too many fighter ships still out there._

_“Katie, please, tell me what’s happening?”_

_“Pidge, we gotta go.”_

_“I can’t get through this FUCKING door.”_

_“Shiro, hang on just a little longer!”_

_“We’re deploying our last back-up speeder to try and fend off the fighters.”_

_“All of you GO. GET TO SAFETY,” Shiro said, every word sounding like it pained him. “Take the Black Lion with you. Defeat Zarkon. Do it for me.”_

_“Shiro, I’m coming,” Pidge said, as clearly and steadily as she had ever said anything in her life._

_“You won’t get—”_

_“I have another way to get there.”_

_“Don’t you dare,” Shiro panted. “You promised, Pidge. Don’t do it. Not for me.”_

_“What is it?” Allura asked. “Pidge, what are you doing?”_

_“Matt,” she said, turning to her brother. An eerie sense of calm had settled over her. All of the panic, the breaking ship, the shots of the fighter pilots, seemed to be happening very far away. “Send five of the crew members into the Yellow Lion. You and the other three, come with me.” She turned on her heel and marched into the airlock. Five of the crewmembers climbed through Yellow’s open mouth. Pidge led the other four into Green. She took her brother, and sat him in the pilot seat._

_“Katie, what—?”_

_“This is my magical robot lion. Follow the yellow one back to the silver spaceship and head inside.”_

_“But how do I—?”_

_“Green,” she addressed her lion sharply, “this is my brother, Matt. You’re going to help him fly you back to the Castle of Lions, got it?” Her lion made a noise like the mechanical equivalent of a cat that’s been unexpectedly kicked off your lap. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”_

_“But, but, where are you_ going _—?”_

_“I’m sorry, Shiro,” she said. She pulled a vial out of her pocket. Her dirty little secret. Her Keep in Case of Emergency. She broke it in her hand, muttered a few words, and concentrated as hard as she could on the center top room of the Druids’ ship. As she fell apart, she heard the distant sound of a scream through her helmet._

_It seemed the action was all but instantaneous. One moment she was standing in the cockpit of the Green Lion, next to her miraculously alive brother, and the next she was in a dark Druid ship, illuminated by a ghastly purple light, surrounded by dissipating smoke and feeling slightly motion sick._

_“No…” she breathed. “No, I can’t be too late. No. SHIRO!” Haggar’s body lay in a broken heap on the floor, leaking excess quintessence, but she barely registered that. Shiro was next to her, his helmet a few feet away. His right arm was a mangled, torn apart mess, half torn away at the shoulder where it connected to flesh and blood. His face was smeared with blood, and one hand rested ineffectually over an ugly gash through his side. She ran to him, collapsing on her knees by his head. She pulled her own helmet off._

_“You… shouldn’t have done that,” he breathed._

_“I can’t lose you. Shiro, Shiro, please, don’t do this. Not today.” She ripped a piece of cloth from Haggar’s cloak and pressed it to the wound in his side. He gasped sharply at the pressure. “Matt’s alive. He’s alive and he’s waiting for you back at the castle. I got part of my family back today, don’t you dare make me lose someone else.”_

_“Pidge, don’t ever use the Druid magic again. Please, you have to promise…” The door crashed inward and Keith rushed into the room. He took one look at Shiro, and then scooped him up and draped him over his shoulder._

_“I’ve got Shiro. He needs to get into a healing pod as fast as possible. Make sure that you’re ready to cover our lions. We’re heading back to the castle as fast as possible. Pidge is here. Somehow.” He glanced back at her. “Come on, let’s go. You need to help me get the Black Lion back to the ship.” Pidge scrambled to her feet, replacing her helmet and grabbing Shiro’s. The hand she’d used to break the vial felt like it was burning._

_“Keith,” Shiro said softly._

_“Save your strength,” he ordered, and took off running faster than Pidge thought possible. She followed, stumbling after him as best she could. Her hand continued to burn. Her skin felt like it was stretching and bubbling inside her glove, but she couldn’t stop. Shiro hung limply off of Keith’s shoulder._

_A blast of gunfire came unexpectedly from their left. Keith caught it in his side and crashed against the wall, sending Shiro flying in the process. Pidge, slightly behind him, dove to the ground and had her bayard out in the blink of an eye. Its electric green whip shot towards the Galra drone, wrapping around its center. She yanked hard to the right, sending him crashing into his buddy, and sent a wave of electricity running down the weapon into the drones. They sparked violently, legs and arms jerking randomly, and then went still, smoking. Pidge recalled her whip._

_Keith was struggling to his feet, an ugly burn mark on his suit. “We gotta go,” he was saying, “there are probably more…” He stumbled over to where Shiro had fallen and went to his knees, reaching to picking him up again, but Shiro reached up and caught his arm._

_“Keith. Stop.”_

_“No, we need to move—”_

_“I’m not going to make it.” Shiro tried to shift to get a better view of Keith’s face, and made a sound like a wounded animal as the shattered remains of his metal arm scraped against the ground. “Keith, listen to me.” Every breath was a gasp, every word dragged out like torture. “You have to — defeat Zarkon. You… you can do it. Without the Druids, he’ll be vulnerable. Be smart. Start closing in… then when the moment is right, strike. Cut out the heart, and the Galra Empire will fall._ You _, Keith, you can do it, do — nnnnhhh — do you understand?”_

_“Don’t—”_

_“I need… I need you to understand.”_

_Pidge had seen Keith cry only once before. The sight of tears in his eyes hit her like a punch in the gut. How had they ended up here again, kneeling over a teammate they were powerless to save? This couldn’t be happening. If she could get back to the ship instantly, if they could get Shiro into a healing pod_ right now _… but that was hopeless thinking. She did not have a second vial. She wasn’t sure she could bring Shiro with her even if she did._

_“I understand,” Keith said. Shiro breathed a sigh of relief._

_“Pidge,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper. He coughed, and blood ran down his mouth. “Tell… tell Matt—” He coughed again, his body spasmed in a way that made her nauseous to watch, his eyes bulged out as if in surprise, and then, mercifully, he was still._

_“Shiro?” Keith said. “Shiro?”_

_Pidge’s throat was sore from a scream she didn’t even hear._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Please leave a comment if you are so inclined!


	3. Chapter 3

### Part 3: Keith

            She stayed still a long time after Matt had parked the speeder. The gas station was a small, dirty place, glowing with cheap yellow light. They probably sold magazines and gum and cheap coffee. It was the most ordinary thing she’d seen in a long, long time.

            “Are we going to go buy something to eat? We’ve got another two hours of driving,” Matt said. She glanced at him, nodded silently, and slid slowly off the back of the speeder. It was absurd, but the idea of talking to another human being, a totally mundane human being who had never left Earth’s atmosphere, almost sent her into hysterics of laughter. She felt like she had the biggest inside joke in all the world, and it was going to take all of her willpower not to blurt out, “I’m basically an alien!” Looking for an explanation for her hesitation, she offered, “Well, we are technically passing counterfeit.”

            “It’s twenty bucks that are guaranteed to be 100% indistinguishable from the real thing.” Matt rolled his eyes. “If the Alteans can create sentient magical lion robots I would hope they could print a few dollar bills. Besides, we spent ten years in space taking down an empire. A little petty crime is nothing.”

            “It’s a federal crime, Matt.”

            “I blew up a warship the size of Earth’s moon!” She laughed at his offended expression and took off towards the gas station with a bit of Green Paladin confidence in her step.

            “Alright, I’ll be sure to let the prosecutor know that you’re single-handedly responsible for destruction of a Galra fleet,” she teased. “Come on, let’s buy some Earth junk food. Do you think they still sell Snickers? I’ve been craving a Snickers for like, six years.” Matt followed her, rolling his eyes.

            She paused once more, reaching for the door handle. A man with a short scruffy beard and a baseball cap was reading a magazine behind the counter, its cover folded back against the opposite page so he could hold it with one hand. The cheap yellow light illuminated aisles of potato chips and sodas, broken by cracked linoleum floors. She breathed slowly in and out, gripped the door handle, and pulled it open. The man barely glanced up as two of the people responsible for the continued existence of his planet entered his store on a drafty Friday night.

            Pidge wandered the aisles for as long as she could, trying her best not to gape. It was all so familiar, and yet so strange. She remembered Doritos – messy orange dust all over her cheeks as she and Matt tried to toss them into each other’s mouths – but what on Earth were Crackle Chips? Were they new? Had she forgotten them? Had she just never known about them while on Earth? She felt breathlessly out of place. Shoes made almost a million light-years away clicked against the linoleum floor.

            She finally grabbed a bag of trail mix, a soda, and a Snickers bar and brought them over to the counter. Matt added an energy bar and his own soda. The man at the counter glanced up as they approached and set the magazine down.

            “How you doing, tonight, folks?” he asked. “Find everything you need?”

            “Fine. Good. Yes. We’re, we’re good, thank you,” Pidge stuttered. She dropped her handful of items on the counter, and as she pushed them towards the man she saw his gaze fixate with curiosity on her left hand. She yanked it back, curling it protectively into a fist. The man said nothing, but she knew what he had seen. The skin in the center of her palm was sunken, wrinkly, and dark blue.

            “How are you?” Matt asked. Always more tactful than her.

            “I’m fine, thank you,” he said, scanning the items with practiced rapidity. “That’ll be $12.53.” Pidge felt a brief lurch as she handed over the alien counterfeit, but he didn’t even look twice at it, just handed over her change and offered them a cheap biodegradable bag. “Have a nice evening.”

            “Thank you, you too.” Pidge took the change and the bag in her right hand, still clenching her left fist closed. She would probably spend a lot of time hiding that scar.

            _Pidge pushed her glasses up so she could rub at her eyes. She had been jiggling the translation in this line of code for an hour without results. With her luck, when she finally figured out the exact sequence needed to send the Galra data through Altean technology to render comprehensible English, she’d emerge victorious with the janitor rotation schedule. She leaned back against the wall, sighing in frustration. At least tucked away in the corner of a hangar no one was harassing her about results. Allura wouldn’t think to look for her here._

_The hiss of the hangar doors opening made her jump, grabbing for her computer, ready with an excuse on her tongue — Sorry, Allura, Hunk had mentioned Blue seemed to be buckling on its back left leg when landing, I was coming to ask you if you wanted me to check it out — when she heard a heavy sigh that definitely did not sound like Allura. The hangar doors hissed close, and she heard, very softly, “Hey, Lance.”_

_She froze, paralyzed by surprise and uncertainty. Slowly, she peeked out through Blue’s legs from her hiding spot. In her corner, she was completely concealed from the rest of the hangar by a combination of the lion and a stack of stolen Galra tech. She heard a bag drop and someone sit down heavily. “It’s been a while since I last did this, huh?” Leaning out another inch, she caught sight of him. Keith was sitting against Blue’s front leg, gazing up at his impassive glowing eyes._

_She should leave. She should cough, or drop something, or just step out and announce her presence, but however she did it she should let Keith know she was there and then leave as fast as she possibly could. Yet, she couldn’t get herself to move. She stared from behind Blue’s leg, her best impulses stuck in her throat._

_“And I guess, the last time I was here, I was a bit of a mess, wasn’t I?” Keith laughed softly. “I remember throwing a few things. I just… I couldn’t believe I let it happen again.” His voice dropped, and became rough and dark. “I failed. Another Paladin died, and I couldn’t do a thing to stop it. And to think it would be_ Shiro _…” He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the lion’s leg. “After everything he went through, after everything we’ve done, I had to stand on the other side of a door and listen to him die. He was just as bull-headed as you. Dammit, Lance, I was supposed to be the rash and stubborn one.” His eyes were open again and he leaned forward over his knees, directing his tirade upwards, toward Blue’s head. “Now I’m the leader, can you believe that? I’m supposed to be the_ role model _.” He snorted. “You know what happened the first time I tried to pilot the Black Lion? I kept crashing into things cause he’s so damn big compared to Red. Murin, that Altean boy, you remember him, he’s got Red now. I guess you know that. He hasn’t got my flair, though.” He smirked. “But I can’t show him how to be a reckless badass because I’m supposed to be demonstrating leadership and responsibility. Who in the world thought_ that _was a good idea, huh? You’d have some crack about it. Ah. Murin’s a good kid. He’s got a rebel’s heart, anyway.”_

_There was a long pause. Pidge tried to shift silently to relieve her cramping legs. When Keith spoke again, she had to hold her breath to catch what he was saying._

_“We all asked Allura to be the Black Paladin, after it happened. I mean, even when Shiro was… still around, we still all deferred to her, y’know? Princess of Altea, and all that. But she refused. She said since the former Black Paladins had been Zarkon, Alfor, and Shiro – y’know, her nemesis, her father, and her lover – she couldn’t do it. So she kept you, and I wound up with Black.” Keith shrugged. “He’s not so bad. He’s very, hmm, calm, I guess. Red used to get wound up right along with me. Black reminds me to keep a level head. And it’s what Shiro wanted, so… Well, you know the reason for that. Speaking of…” Keith grimaced, gripped his shirt, and pulled it up over his head. Pidge clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle her gasp._

_All the Paladins had scars. The lions might be powerful, but they were unwieldy, so with all of their infiltration and stealth missions, they ended up doing plenty of close-quarters fighting. But Coran was an excellent medic, and anything serious just meant a quick overnight in a healing pod, something that usually left little more than a thin white line where a gaping wound had been. Keith got into more fights than most of them, but that still shouldn’t have left him looking like this._

_A dozen scars crisscrossed his torso and arms. Some of them she could identify: the long slash across his lower back must be from that ambush on the planet Orazzo, the cut across the left side of his ribs was probably from the time their speeder crashed, the ugly star on his side was from the blast that had blindsided them when Shiro was dying. But there were so many of them, so many years of fighting written across his body, that she doubted even Keith remembered where all of them came from anymore. The strangest part, though, was that every scar was a nauseatingly familiar shade of purple._

_Biting into his left shoulder was a fresh cut, blood soaking through a hasty bandage. If she squinted, she could make it out against his dark shirt as well. That must be from this morning, when he had fought off that Galra drone in the supply ship. But hadn’t he said that it was nothing, not even worth Coran taking a look at? He was pulling the bandage off now, wincing. That wasn’t nothing. He should be in a healing pod. What the quiznak was he doing?_

_Keith had opened up the bag he’d brought with him, and pulled out a needle and thread. Pidge bit down on her hand to stop herself crying out when she realized what he intended to do. This didn’t make any sense. Why hadn’t he asked to be put in a healing pod for an hour or so?_

_Had he ever been in a healing pod?_

_The question brought her up short. Of course, he must’ve been, she thought, and yet she could not think of a single specific instance. She remembered Keith brushing Coran and the rest of them off a dozen times – “It’s nothing” “Just a scratch” “Hunk got blasted worse, you should look at him” “Don’t worry about me” – but she had always assumed that if he actually had a serious injury, he would drop the tough guy act. Had he been sewing himself up all this time? No, he couldn’t have been. Some of those scars on his back would have been impossible for him to see or reach. But then how, and why…?_

_“Son of a BITCH that hurts,” Keith swore as he rubbed disinfectant into the wound. “Ugh, if I keep getting these scars my entire body is gonna be purple soon. I guess then I’ll really look the part, huh?” He stabbed the needle through his skin as he spoke, as if he hoped to distract himself from it. Pidge squeezed her eyes shut. “I ought to tell them,” he sighed, his arm arched awkwardly across his chest to reach the opposite shoulder. “The other Paladins, at least. I mean with you and Shiro gone… If somebody really cuts me open I don’t have anyone to help me. And it might be even more awkward than it already is to have the healing pod spill the beans when it analyzes my — NNHKK.” Keith pulled the needle through one last time. “I just… After so long, I have no idea how they might react.” His eyes softened. “You remember how you found out? You walked into my room when I wasn’t there and thought someone had murdered me in my bed because of the blood all over my sheets. I came back to find you ready to call ‘the space police’.” Keith rolled his eyes. “Instead you just find out one of your teammates is part Galra.”_

_Pidge felt icy. A shiver ran down her spine, like when snow gets inside your coat. She could hear her heart pounding in her ears, so loudly she thought Keith must be able to hear it too. He was bandaging the wound back up, more neatly this time, despite only being able to use one hand._

_“You yelled at me for ten minutes straight about getting into a healing pod, without giving me time to get a word in, before you noticed the purple scar. That shut you up.” Keith eyes had softened, and a small, sad smile curved his lips. “Then… you didn’t even ask questions, you just helped sew me up and sat with me all night. You remember? You held out a whole week before you couldn’t take it any more and asked me about it. Do you remember that, Lance?” He had finished putting the new bandage on. He pulled out a clean shirt and slid carefully into it. “And then when Shiro found out…” He laughed. “You were so ready to fight him. You went full knight-in-shining-armor on me. The way you stood up in front of me, like you thought he might try and rush me right then and there… We were both too surprised to do anything. But you, you started talking a million miles a minute, telling Shiro that just cause I was part Galra it didn’t mean anything, and practically daring him to try and kick me off the team, all before he had finished processing what was happening.” Keith’s head was bowed, laughter and tears struggling through his words in equal measure. “I don’t think I’ve ever loved you more.”_

_“Keith?” Pidge was almost as astonished as Keith, who jumped like he had been electrified and scrambled to his feet, to find herself standing out in the open, underneath the lion’s belly._

_“What—? When did you—? How much did you—?”_

_She didn’t let him finish. She rushed forward, threw her arms around him, and hugged him as tight as she could. He stopped spluttering, too surprised to move or speak._

_“I don’t care what you are,” she said into his chest. “You’re Keith, and you’re my friend, you’re my family, and that’s all that matters.” After a long moment of hesitation, he returned her hug, his arms wrapping tightly around her shoulders and resting his cheek against her hair. She could feel him shaking against her and squeezed even tighter. They stood, unmoving, holding one another in the silence._

Pidge wiped her hands against her pants, brushing off the crumbs of trail mix, and crumpled the bag up in her hand. She stood up, pushing off the side of the speeder, and walked over to drop it in the trash can, accepting Matt’s empty soda can as well. They were still outside the gas station, leaning up against the speeder and refueling themselves in silence. She went back to the speeder, but neither of them climbed on right away. Instead, she tilted her head back and looked up at the stars.

            “The Big Dipper,” she smiled, pointing. “Pisces. Pegasus. Andromeda. Capricornus.”

            “What are you doing?”

            “It’s been so long since I’ve really known where I am,” she said wistfully. “Used to be, I knew all about what was in the sky. I knew where we were in the universe, where the nearest stars were, what the planets were called. Then, for so long, I was just… lost. I mean, not really _lost_ , I knew where I was in relation to other people and where I wanted to go and everything, but I was just out somewhere in space, you know, and I couldn’t orient myself. I didn’t even know where our galaxy was, let alone our planet. Recognizing the stars in the sky almost feels weird now, you know?”

            “Yeah,” Matt said gently. “I do know.”

            They watched the stars in silence for a few minutes. A meteor shot across the sky. Pidge wondered idly if it might really be a ship, and then laughed at herself. She would sound like a conspiracy theorist if she brought that idea up to anyone but Matt.

            She wondered how she would sound making her four visits. Quite possibly like a babbling conspiracy theorist, unless Earth had learned more about the Galra than she thought. At least Lance and Hunk she had known personally on Earth, and she had a family connection to Shiro, but Keith she had met less than twenty-four hours before getting blasted through a wormhole. She had no reason to even know who he was. In addition, he had no family left on Earth, not even an adoptive one. She probably should have just left it alone, but she didn’t feel right about it. Someone deserved to know what he had done, what he had achieved. It had taken a great deal of digging and some hacking, but she had finally dug up the name and address of Keith’s old roommate at the Garrison. It seemed like the two of them had been friends, although she could only recall Keith mentioning him once, and that only in passing. She might be walking in to tell this epic tale to somebody who barely even remembered the guy. Still, she needed to tell his story, especially if he refused to.

 

            _Dear everyone,_

_I’m sorry to do it like this, but I know that if I had told you in person you all would have tried to convince me to stay, and I’m afraid that I would have listened. A note was the only way I could trust myself to say everything I wanted to say, the way I wanted to say it._

_I’m leaving. Well, by the time you’ll be reading this, I will already have left. I promised I would fight until Zarkon was defeated, and now I have. We have torn out the heart of the Galra Empire, and with a little help, now the rest of it will fall. I am so incredibly proud and thankful to everyone who has been part of that. I cannot tell you how much it means to me to have been part of Voltron for these past ten years. But I’ve finished what I set out to do, and now my time as a Paladin is done._

_After everything that happened in our final battle, I feel like it is time for me to lay down my weapon and stop fighting for a while. I do not regret anything I did, but the savagery I found in myself, the savagery I needed to fight Zarkon one-on-one, is something I hope I never have to feel again. I hope you all understand._

_I have questions, about my family and my past, and I want to go searching for answers. I don’t know where this might take me. I do sincerely hope that our paths will cross again in the future._

_In the meantime, I’m sorry to dump a search for the new Black Paladin on you. If you want my recommendation, choose Hunk. He has more than come into his own as a Paladin over the years, and he will be a good leader in reestablishing peace and diplomacy throughout the universe. His days of vomiting in the cockpit are long gone! If he accepts, he’s far better qualified than I am to tell you who the next Yellow Paladin should be._

_Once again, it has been an honor flying and fighting with you. I am proud beyond words of what we have accomplished._

_Until we meet again._

_Keith_

_PS Allura, if it isn’t a problem, I would appreciate if you would put the conch shell I’ve left with this letter in Blue’s cockpit. I paid an arm and a leg for it (sorry, Coran, I may have bargained away your favorite Glimsian mustache comb with the gold filigree) at that market on Cheerkin, but it’s the real deal, all the way from Earth. If you put it up to your ear, you can hear the ocean._

_Pidge set the letter back down on Keith’s pillow, next to the intricate brown and pink shell. His room looked exactly the same as it always had. His Paladin armor stood ready for use in its specialized closet. The recovered black bayard was on the bedside table. Even his signature red jacket had been left hanging over the back of a chair. The only difference was Lance’s old jacket, which had long hung undisturbed on the back of Keith’s door, was gone._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Please leave a comment if you are so inclined!


	4. Chapter 4

### Part 4: Hunk

            The city rearing up in the distance was surprisingly underwhelming. She had seen cities the size of small planets, cities built in space, in the sky, underwater. After all that, a typical Earth city, with its average skyscrapers and twinkling streetlights, seemed almost boring.

            She was driving now, with Matt sitting behind her, staring at the buildings. Full of humans, she had to remind herself. Full of people just like me, and yet not like me at all. She slowed as they got closer, trying to remember what the traffic signs meant. She felt like laughing aloud again when she remembered she didn’t have a license. She could pilot a mystical green robot lion through space but she wasn’t supposed to be behind the wheel of a car. Counterfeit, driving without a license, probably something about unauthorized air travel when they landed the spaceship — she was breaking all kinds of laws tonight.

            The buildings started to crowd in on the side of the road, growing higher and skinnier. People appeared on the sidewalk, many of them glancing at the strange and futuristic motorcycle zipping past them. A restaurant with its doors open poured music and light into the street. Something that smelled delicious — what was it, hot spice, cheese, sharply seasoned meat, ah yes, Mexican cuisine — wafted past her nose. She couldn’t remember what it would taste like. How long would it take her to forget the taste of food goo, or nunvil?

            “They sound like they’re having a party in there,” Matt murmured into her ear.

            “Yeah,” she said, glancing back as they turned the corner. “They do.”

            _The sounds of a party drifted over the sparkling surface of the Balmera. Colored light refracted a hundred thousand times against its crystals shattered into the sky. A deep, rhythmic music countered by a fluttery melody echoed across the Balmera, the sounds of laughter and conversation floating on top of it. Pidge hugged her knees to her chest, leaning up against a crystal and staring upwards._

_“So this is where you got to.” She glanced over her shoulder to see Hunk standing behind her._

_“How’s Shay?” she asked._

_“Oh, she’s great,” he enthused, lowering himself to the ground next to her. “She and her brother helped set up this entirely new committee thing that like, represents the Balmerans and they confer with the Balmera to build their houses and everything, and they’ve cleaned up all of the mining equipment the Galra left behind, and…” He trailed off. “Why don’t you come join the party?”_

_“I will, in a minute. I just… The last time we were here, there were still five of us. I mean, the original five of us. I can’t believe…”_

_“Well, Keith is out there somewhere,” Hunk said. “And Lance is still here, in… in a way. And Shiro’s, he’s with us in spirit, you know?”_

_“Still.”_

_“I know.” Hunk was quiet for a moment, but shifty, and then broke out with, “Sorry, but do we really have to have this conversation underneath that thing? It gives me the creeps. And it did try really hard to kill us.” The crystal-encased remains of a many-eyed robot loomed menacingly over them. Pidge laughed._

_“It seemed… like a monument.”_

_“Yeah, I advocate erecting a less creepy monument.”_

_“Fair enough.” They sat in silence for another minute or two. “So, how’s the Black Lion?” Hunk rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly._

_“Oh, he’s great, you know, he’s really… It’s a lot of responsibility, you know, but all of what Keith said in his letter, it was really flattering. I just hope I can live up to it, I mean, Shiro and Keith, man, those are big shoes to fill. And I’m not even sure what we’re doing anymore, right, I mean we defeated Zarkon, but does that mean we’ve brought peace? What’s the next step?”_

_“_ Hunk _. You’re rambling.” He stopped, grinning awkwardly. She punched his arm. “You’ll be awesome at it. I’m happy for you.”_

_“Thanks. And Pashina, she was so psyched to join the Voltron team. She’s gonna do great as the Yellow Paladin.” She smiled and leaned against him._

_“I’m glad you’re still here, Hunk,” she said._

_“Hey man,” he said, wrapping an arm around her shoulder. “You’re like, my space sister.” Together they gazed up, past the crystal-encased monster, into the stars. Pidge thought she could just pick out Arus in the distance._

            “We’re here.”

            Pidge stopped the speeder next to the sidewalk. A relatively wealthy apartment building towered above them, its elegant glass doors dark in the moonlight. Neither she nor Matt did anything but stare up at it for a long moment. Pidge tapped the screen with the map on the speeder, and it switched off, leaving them in darkness.

            “Do you think she’ll even recognize us? If it’s even her.”

            “You look a lot like Mom in her younger pictures. Well, you’d look a bit more like her if your hair was long. But still…”

            “She’s probably going to ask about Dad,” she said quietly. Matt nodded slowly.

            “We don’t need to tell her the full story, about anything, at least not tonight. I’ll just… I’ll just tell her I was with him when he died. I don’t need to say how it happened.” He looked down, not meeting her eyes. “There are some things it would only be painful to know.” She reached back and squeezed his hand. Together, they slid off of the speeder and slowly approached the building. Next to the door was a series of buttons, accompanied by little slips of white paper with names on them. There, sitting innocently two rows from the bottom, was a slip that said “HOLT.” Taking a deep breath, Pidge reached out and pressed it.

            After a moment the door buzzed, making them both jump. She and Matt glanced at each other. He shrugged. “Maybe she’s expecting someone,” he said, and pulled the door open. She followed slowly.

            Not for the first time, she wondered how she was going to even get in the door for those four visits she had planned. “I’m here to talk to you about your son/brother/friend who has been presumed dead for ten years,” seemed like a bad conversation starter. And even once she managed to get in the door, she wasn’t sure how she was supposed to break the truth. Telling Lance and Shiro’s families that their sons were, in fact, dead, just several years later than they had thought, was going to be difficult and confusing enough. She had no idea how the conversation with Keith’s friend was going to go. Her meeting with Hunk’s brother, though, might end up being the worst one of all. How did you tell someone their brother was out there somewhere, still alive, but you didn’t know where and he might be coming back never?

            _Pidge caught her breath when they got to the other side of the wormhole. By some twist of fate, they were practically next door to Kerberos, where all of this had started so long ago. She squinted, jiggling half-remembered numbers in her head, trying to figure out which direction Earth was. There was a small gasp behind her._

_“Is that your planet?” Pashina asked, her perpetually wide grey eyes drinking in the scenery. Pidge laughed._

_“Oh no, no, no, we’re right at the edge of my solar system here. You’d need a pretty powerful telescope to be able to see Earth from here.” Pashina nodded solemnly._

_“I was afraid for a moment you lived on a very barren planet.”_

_“There you are!” Coran called behind them. “Come along, we’ve got a big farewell dinner all set up in the Great Hall! Everyone will be there!”_

_“Yes, Coran, we know you’ve been planning it for weeks,” Murin said from the doorway. “We all promise to be very admiring and appreciative.”_

_“You should not tease Coran. He tries very hard to make us happy,” Pashina scolded. Murin rolled his eyes in good-natured annoyance._

_“I just want to make sure we give a good send-off to the last two Paladins who formed the first Voltron team in 10,000 years!” Coran said. “It’s a momentous occasion!”_

_“Yeah, and we all wanna see who’s gonna be the new Paladins,” Murin grinned. “Think I’m too irresponsible to be recommended to the Black, Pashina?”_

_“You put Panagardian space shrimp in Coran’s mustache two weeks ago,” Pashina said, completely straight-faced. Murin went red._

_“Why would you—?”_

_“That was YOU?” Coran shouted. “Why, you little—” Murin looked at Coran, then made an abrupt decision to turn and flee. Coran chased after him, shouting something that Pidge suspected was very dirty in Altean. She burst out laughing so hard tears came to her eyes. Pashina looked at her curiously._

_“Why are you laughing? Did I do something wrong?” she asked. Pidge waved a hand frantically, trying to catch her breath enough to speak._

_“Nononono,” she gasped. “You did everything perfectly right.”_

_“Hey guys, why is Coran chasing after Murin and threatening to stick his head in a bucket of space shrimp?” Hunk asked. Pidge lapsed into fresh peals of laughter as Pashina started to explain. He held up a hand. “You know what, I’m not sure I really want to know. Pashina, can I talk to Pidge for a moment?”_

_“Yes, you can,” she said._

_“Sorry, I meant, would you mind leaving us alone so I can talk to Pidge for a moment?”_

_“No, I would not mind,” she said, and touched Pidge lightly on the shoulder. “I am glad if I made you laugh happily,” she said. Pidge grinned at her, and she slid out of the room._

_“What’s up?” she asked Hunk. He sighed, coming to join her by the window, staring out at Kerberos._

_“You and Matt looking forward to being back on Earth?” he asked. She shifted from foot to foot._

_“Honestly, I’m not sure how to feel about it,” she said. “Yes, I guess, but this has been my life for ten years, and that’s gonna be… That’s gonna be pretty hard to reconcile with being back on Earth and probably mostly pretending none of this ever happened. I’m gonna miss being the Green Paladin. I’m gonna miss Allura, and Coran, and Voltron, and Murin and Pashina and everyone else here. It isn’t gonna be easy.”_

_“Yeah,” Hunk said, looking at his feet. “Listen, Pidge, I… I’m not going back to Earth.” His statement hit like a sledgehammer to her chest._

_“What?”_

_“I’m staying here. In the Castle of Lions.”_

_“But… WHY? Wasn’t the whole idea always that we’d defeat Zarkon and then we’d get to go home? We’ve even spent almost six months chasing down his remaining generals and the last of the Druids.” He sighed._

_“A long time ago… Yeah, that was the idea. And I do really, really want to go home. But Voltron’s work isn’t done._

_“The Galra had thousands of colonies and enslaved planets. They’re not all going to give up overnight. And even the ones that do, some of those planets haven’t been independent in thousands of years. Who knows what kind of disasters a bunch of planets ruled by anarchy might cause? A Paladin is supposed to be more than just a warrior — we’re supposed to be ambassadors, helping keep the peace. We owe it to these planets we’ve freed to make sure they don’t plunge themselves into an even worse war. And I wouldn’t feel right just leaving it all to someone else._

_“Do you remember, a long time ago, when you tried to leave to find your family? I was going to leave too, if I could get back to Earth. But then Sendak attacked and we had to get a new Balmera crystal, and that’s when I met Shay and the other Balmerans. That’s when I really realized the extent of the damage the Galra had done. And I knew, all I knew was that I wanted to help these people. I OWED it to these people to help them if I could, because I had this amazing opportunity, this amazing gift, that I was part of the universe’s best hope to defeat the Galra Empire. And even back then, I knew the job wouldn’t end when Zarkon was dead, however long that took._

_“I spent a long time thinking I should at least visit Earth. But whenever I tried to decide how long I would stay, it just seemed… ludicrous. Inadequate. How do you come back from the dead ten years later and tell your family you’re leaving again in a week, like you’re visiting them on vacation? If I go back to Earth, I don’t know when I would leave again. But it might take a very long time._

_“So I need you to do something for me. I know you’ve been searching for Lance and Shiro and Keith’s families. I need you to go to my brother as well. Tell him I love him, and I’ll be home one day. But for now…” Hunk tightened his headband. “For now, I’m still the Black Paladin.” Pidge sighed, trying hard to ignore the tightening in her throat. She wrapped an arm around Hunk._

_“You always were a big-hearted idiot,” she said. “I’ll miss you.”_

_“I’ll miss you too.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Please leave a comment if you are so inclined!


	5. Chapter 5

### Epilogue: Pidge

            The apartment door swung open to reveal a woman slightly shorter than Pidge, her wispy white hair escaping from the bun on the back of her head. Her eyes were almost lost to sunken crow’s feet. She held the door open with her foot, struggling with a half-open wallet and counting out her money.

            “Sorry, you got here faster than I was expecting. Let’s see, how much was it, seven, eight, there’s a quarter—” She glanced up and stopped in surprise. “You’re not the pizza delivery.” Pidge and Matt glanced at each other. Now they were actually here, all her words seemed to vanish. What was she supposed to say? How could she even start? The woman was staring at them through thick, wire-framed glasses. Did she recognize them? Did she think she was hallucinating if she did? Matt cleared his throat, opened his mouth as if he were going to say something, but then stopped, at a loss. The woman’s lower lip trembled.

            “M…Matt? Katie? Is that… But you can’t be…”

            “Hi Mom,” Matt managed, his voice scratchy and tear-choked.

            “We’re alive,” Pidge said. “…Surprise.”

            “Oh KATIE!” The woman flung herself forward, dropping her wallet, and caught Pidge around the neck in a hug, sobbing into her shoulder. Without letting go of her daughter, she reached one arm out and grabbed Matt as well. Together the three of them stumbled, losing their balance, and wound up on their knees, all of them crying and hugging one another. Eventually their mother managed to pull herself back to her feet, tears still leaking freely down her cheeks. “I don’t understand,” she said, cupping their cheeks with her hand, caressing them, taking their shoulder, continually needing to reassure herself they were real. “How… Where…”

            “That is… a very long story,” Pidge said, swiping away her tears.

            “Why don’t we go inside?” Matt said. “We’ll tell you… we’ll tell you everything.” The woman nodded, catching their hands in hers.

            Next to the door of the apartment was an open widow, letting in a cool night breeze. Pidge paused a moment as her mother and Matt walked into the apartment, taking a last look up at the night sky. Somewhere deep in her chest, she felt something come undone. It was nothing like the painful _SNIP_ that she had felt when Blue’s original quintessence was destroyed, but a gentler version of the same thing. A connection had been lost, an awareness disconnected. Deep in her bones, she knew she was truly no longer the Green Paladin.

            With a small, nostalgic smile, she followed her mother into her apartment and said goodbye to her time in the stars.

            _“Ooh, that, there, that looks kinda like a bear. Or maybe a dog? But like look there are its paws, and you could kinda imagine it’s bending down to catch a fish or something.”_

_“Are you kidding me, Hunk?” Lance waved his hands expressively in the air. “It_ obviously _looks more like a raccoon. Look, it’s got a triangular little head.”_

_“A raccoon, Lance? Really?”_

_“Hey, don’t elbow me in the face, idiot,” Keith said, shoving at Lance, who had chosen to pillow his head on Keith’s stomach._

_“I’m not going to elbow you in the face, why would I elbow you in the face?” Lance paused. “I quite like that face.”_

_“Did you take that pause because you had to decide whether to flirt with me or insult me?”_

_“Do you two_ ever _stop?” Hunk groaned._

_“Alright, everyone, I’ve got nunvil all around!” Coran came outside precariously carrying five cups, wobbling back and forth as he tried to hold the door open for Allura with his foot. Shiro jumped up to help. “No, no worries young Paladin, I’ve got this!” he said, balancing a cup on his head. Shiro plucked it off._

_“Thanks, Coran!” Lance called. “Hit me up over here!”_

_“Come get it yourself before I spill it on your head.” Shiro, rolling his eyes, handed cups out to Lance, Keith, Hunk, and Pidge._

_“Cheers, Shiro,” Lance said. Coran, relieved of all the excess cups, dropped to the long, blue grass on crossed legs beside them and took a swig from his own nunvil. Allura came out with two more and handed one to Shiro. Pidge caught him blushing slightly as his hand brushed the princess’s. She grinned knowingly at him._

_“A toast,” Allura said, raising her cup, “to the first star system entirely liberated from Zarkon’s control!”_

_“Hear, hear!” Coran echoed. “To Voltron and all the Paladins!”_

_“To Voltron!” they all said, raising their cups and knocking back a swallow. The nunvil ran like a firecracker from Pidge’s stomach up her back and into her brain, and then settled warm and loose in her body. She smiled lazily. The sky above them stretched and glittered, mapped by their invented constellations, red and yellow planets winked from their odd, spiraling orbits, newly freed of Galra soldiers. She sighed, flopping back onto the grass. For perhaps the first time since the Garrison had announced the “crash” on Kerberos, she felt peaceful._

_“So that’s one down, and, uh, how many to go? Not to mention Zarkon himself, who’s gonna be, like, waaaaay harder to take out just by himself than the entire occupying force here was,” Hunk said, swirling his nunvil around anxiously._

_“Let’s… not talk about that tonight,” Shiro said. “We should all be proud of what we’ve accomplished and how far we’ve come.”_

_“Yes,” Allura said. “I must admit, when we first met, I was rather worried that the universe was doomed, or at least that I would not live to see Zarkon defeated. But now, to see how far you have come in so little time, I am beginning to believe we can do it.”_

_“We_ can _do it, Princess,” Shiro said, setting his hand lightly on top of hers._

_“We_ will _do it,” Keith said._

_“Heck yeah we will!” Lance shouted, spilling nunvil on Keith, who shoved him off with a disgusted look. Lance was unfazed. “Now we’ve got the hang of it, we’re gonna go out there and kick those Galra right in their quiznak!”_

_“You really still havent’ figured out how to use that word correctly, have you?” Hunk asked._

_“Uh, I’m pretty sure I just used it_ perfectly _.”_

_“Well, you know, etymologically, the word ‘quiznak’ could have been used in a similar context back when it first appeared in Altean literature back in the 37 th galactic rotation of the—”_

_“Aaaaaand who wants more nunvil?” Shiro interrupted Coran._

_“Ooh, definitely!” Hunk said, holding out his cup._

_“For me too,” Keith said._

_Pidge lay on the grass, listening quietly and sipping at her drink, smiling at the chatter. To think that just a few years ago she couldn’t have imagined this in her wildest dreams. “I’m gonna miss this,” she sighed. Hunk cast a curious look down at her._

_“Miss what?”_

_“This,” she said, sitting up and throwing her arms wide. “We’re sitting on a faraway world, drinking nunvil with a couple 10,000-year-old aliens—”_

_“Who don’t look a day over 30!” Coran interjected cheerfully._

_“—and we just saved like 10 planets! I mean, I want to go home once we’ve won. But it’s going to feel really quiet and dull once we’re not visinting a new planet every week.” She sighed. “I’m just gonna miss it.”_

_“Yeah, but once we’re back on Earth, you can all come to my house, and my mamá is gonna make you the best enchiladas that you have ever tasted,” Lance said, once again lying across Keith’s lap._

_“Oh that sounds good,” Hunk moaned. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, Coran, I love your food goo, but sometimes, I miss Earth food. And chewing.”_

_“On the other hand… I must be soooooo behind on my homework by now,” Lance said, sounding much more subdued. Keith burst out laughing._

_“Y’know, I’m pretty sure if the Garrison ever found out you ran off in the middle of the night to break into their quarantine and steal Shiro, and then you just never came back, they’d expel you faster than you can blink. As it is, they probably think you’re dead and named an award after you — well, probably not an award. But I’m sure there’s bathroom somewhere with a nice and shiny, ‘In Memory of Lance Sanchez’ plaque on it.”_

_“Hey!” Lance cried, sitting up. Keith caught the front of his jacket and pulled him close._

_“You’ll just have to come live in the desert with me,” he said. Lance rolled his eyes._

_“I guess I can deal with that, mullet.”_

_“Cargo pilot.”_

_“HEY!”_

_“I’ll make sure you all get honorary degrees from the Garrison,” Shiro broke in. “I’m pretty sure piloting Voltron far surpasses anything the Garrison teaches.”_

_“And of course we’ll come visit,” Coran said. “We can take you on little jaunts out into space. And meet some other Earthlings as well.”_

_“I would enjoy the opportunity to meet more Earthlings, and to visit your planet,” Allura said. Shiro smiled._

_“I would love to show you around Earth, Princess,” he said. “And there would be thousands of people clamoring to meet you, and to learn more about you and Altea and everything out there in the galaxy.” Allura turned her hand up to interlace her fingers with Shiro’s. “You know, we could do a lot of good for Earth with Altean technology. Think about what those healing pods could do!” He looked over at his free right hand. “Maybe even this hand can do some good.” Allura squeezed his left hand._

_“It’s already done a great deal of good taking down Galra soldiers,” she said._

_“Man, my brother is going to be so mind blown by this,” Hunk said. “I cannot wait to see his face when I tell him where I’ve been.”_

_“Alright, going back to Earth’s gonna be a party,” Pidge laughed, and drained the rest of her nunvil. “Just hope the Garrison doesn’t quarantine and sedate the lot of us!” There was an outcry against that, and Pidge grinned to herself, leaning back into the grass. She felt warmer inside than she ever had. She knew, somehow, it would all happen. She’d find her family. They’d defeat Zarkon. They’d return triumphant. But for now, she wouldn’t trade this moment for the universe._

Far away, the sound of the sea swirled in a conch shell, and a blue lion glided peacefully through the stars.

            On a bedside table sat a raggedy-edged photograph of a laughing man and a woman with an exaggerated grin, their white hair overexposed and practically glowing in the flash.

            A dark-haired man wrapped a jacket too long for his torso close around him, watching the universe go by out the window of an interplanetary shuttle.

            On a planet torn by war and exploitation, a man with a yellow headband watched proudly as the first new trade alliance was signed.

            _She looked back once and said goodbye_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *hands out tissues* I'm sorry?
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who read this! I'm not a fanfic writer by habit so I have no idea how much I'll be using this account, although I have at least one other fic in the works at the moment. However, after posting this fic on my tumblr and getting a really positive response from more people than I was expecting, I decided I wanted to post it somewhere it was easier to find and read. That's also why it all went up in two bursts on the same day - it was already completed by the time I got this account. Forgive me if the formatting jumps around a bit for a day or two here, as I'm still figuring out how exactly this website works.
> 
> Anyway, to everyone who read and enjoyed this, thank you so so much, please feel free to leave comments with thoughts or constructive criticism or anything. Really, it's amazing to me that people want to read my writing - so again, just thank you so much. Now go love yourselves and read some fluff.
> 
> PS There may or may not be a one-shot about what happens to Keith after he leaves sitting in a draft on my computer. If that's something you would want to read, let me know.
> 
> EDIT: The one-shot now exists! I don't think it's quite as good as this, but it's called Underneath the Spires and it is here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/8302540 for anyone who may want to read it


End file.
